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What to Do About the Chemicals Found in Tap Water

There was a time when good, clean, safe water was abundant in America, but not any more. Poisons such as chlorine and chloramines are added to our water to "purify" it. Chemicals we use every day, such as weed killers, household disinfectants, and others, many of them toxic and/or carcinogenetic, and even pharmaceutical drugs such as antibiotics, sex hormones and chemotherapy medications have found their way into water supplies throughout this country. In this article we will discuss some of the worst offenders and how we can protect ourselves from them.

The worst offender, found through the U.S. and most developed nations, is chlorine. Chlorine is a deadly poison that is added to our water supplies by the utility companies to destroy water-borne bacteria. Since chlorine dissipates over time, federal regulators require our water suppliers to add enough chlorine to the water to insure its presence even when it enters the last home on the water system's pipeline.

Consequently, if your home is near the water company the amount of chlorine present in your tap water may be huge. I have tested water in many such homes and found it to be in excess of what is considered unsafe for swimming pools!

While government regulators continue to insist low levels of chlorine in drinking water is safe, there is now a wealth of evidence showing this is not true. For instance, the U.S. Council of Environmental Quality stated, "Cancer risk among people using chlorinated water is as much as 93 percent higher than among those whose water does not contain chlorine."

And, "One common factor among women with breast cancer is that they all have 50-60 percent higher levels of these chlorination byproducts (THMs) in their fat tissue than women without breast cancer..." (BreastCancerFund.org)

Also, there is increasing research linking dangerous health risks to pregnant women drinking chlorinated water. These risks include miscarriage, neural tube defects and reduced fetal growth.

Finally, "We are learning the hard way that all the time we thought we were preventing epidemics of one disease, we were creating another. Two decades after the start of chlorinating our drinking water the present epidemic of heart trouble and cancer began."
Joseph M. Price, PhD

What about the other chemicals found in tap water?

We are just now realizing what we flush down the drain, or put on our lawns, or our crops, or allow into the environment in any way will come back to haunt us. We will eventually find it in the water we drink.

Many of the 80,000-plus synthetic organic chemicals we are spreading throughout our environment are toxic and/or carcinogenic (they cause or promote cancer).

How prevalent are they in our water systems?

Years ago, The Ralph Nader Research Group reported, after studying government documents released under the Freedom of Information Act, "U.S. drinking water contains more than 2,100 toxic chemicals that can cause cancer."

Again, government regulators claim low levels of these chemicals in our drinking water are not harmful. But, these claims are based on the effects to an adult and, even then, are not based on long-term studies. And scientists have shown that, even in low, "harmless" levels, these individual chemicals can combine and produce new chemicals a thousand times more powerful.

So, once again, evidence contrary to government reports is building. Rivers and streams that are the sources of the drinking water for many cities are polluted with these chemicals and plant and animal life are showing the effects. For example, fish in the Potomac River, the source of the drinking water for Washington, DC, have been found to have both male and female characteristics from exposure to estrogen-like substances.

You must realize the facilities that treat our water do not remove these chemicals! They typically use sand filtration to remove the visible particles and add bleach. That's it!

Nor do they remove any of the pharmaceutical drugs we are flushing, unused or not metabolized, down our toilets. Drugs like anti-depressants; heart, cancer and blood pressure medications; sex hormones, birth control medications, and more are finding their way into our drinking water.

The point is, these problems are real, widespread and extremely dangerous to your family's health. The only way to protect your family is to filter the water you are drinking, bathing in or cooking with before you use it, after it comes into your home.

So, please, protect your family, and yourself, and get a good water filter system. Any system you get will be better than using your body as a filter but some are better than others when it comes to removing all the contaminants mentioned here, and more, with safety.